Digital Metrics: The importance of getting results

Companies want to know how their money is being spent and whether their effort is successful. As a media professional, you have to know if your campaign is working. The importance of metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) in today’s digital world can’t be underestimated. By monitoring how visitors view your online content, what they say to peers about it, and what kind of actions they take after visiting the site, you can get powerful insights about how your plan is working or what kind of adjustments need to be made to ensure success.

It’s critically important to set your campaign goals and KPIs up front so that you know what you are measuring. Even though sales are doing well, you cannot just assume that those results are coming from your digital marketing plan. While this is an important process to set up in any campaign, it is particularly important in a small business where marketing resources may be slimmer.

Metrics can also be deceiving and may need further analysis beyond the initial evaluation. You can’t take everything at face value. For example, take time spent on a site or return visits. If these numbers are both high, a notice might assume this are positive indicators, right? What actually might be happening is that customers might be visiting the site because they have issues with your product, or they may spend time on it because it is hard to navigate and they’re not getting what they want. That’s why it is important to have a balanced set of KPI’s that validate each other as a check and balance.

Fellow blogger and Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist Avinash Kaushik shares his simple and succinct road map for designing effective digital metrics in a three step formula: ABO- Acquisition, Behavior, and Outcomes. If we can accurately pick the right metrics for each of these buckets in the customer journey– looking at how we attract new customers, what happens when they visit the site, what actions they take a afterward and what is the impact to the business, the road to success becomes more attainable.